1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to a method for creating and implementing zones within a network communication system, and more particularly to a method for creating and implementing such zones for devices within a network communication system using fibre channel connections.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the result of continuous advances in technology, particularly in the area of networking such as the Internet, there is an increasing demand for communications bandwidth. For example, the transmission of data over a telephone company's trunk lines, the transmission of images or video over the Internet, the transfer of large amounts of data as might be required in transaction processing, or videoconferencing implemented over a public telephone network typically require the high speed transmission of large amounts of data. As applications such as these become more prevalent, the demand for communications bandwidth capacity will only increase.
Fibre channel is a transmission medium that is well-suited to meet this increasing demand, and the Fibre Channel family of standards (developed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)) is one example of a standard which defines a high speed communications interface for the transfer of large amounts of data via connections between a variety of hardware devices, including devices such as personal computers, workstations, mainframes, supercomputers, and storage devices. Use of fibre channel is proliferating in many applications, particularly client/server applications which demand high bandwidth and low latency I/O. Examples of such applications include mass storage, medical and scientific imaging, multimedia communications, transaction processing, distributed computing and distributed database processing applications.
In one aspect of the fibre channel standard, the communications between devices is based on the use of a fabric. The fabric is typically constructed from one or more fibre channel switches and each device (or group of devices, for example, in the case of loops) is coupled to the fabric. Devices coupled to the fabric are capable of communicating with every other device coupled to the fabric.
However, there are situations where the ability to freely communicate between all devices on a fabric is not desirable. For example, it may be desirable to screen off certain devices on a fabric in order to perform testing and/or maintenance activities on only those devices, without risking interfering with the other devices on the fabric. Alternately, devices may be segregated according to use. For example, the devices coupled to the fabric may be segregated in one fashion during normal operation and in another fashion to facilitate back-ups or system maintenance. As another example, different levels of security may be enforced by allowing only certain sets of devices to communicate with each other. As a final example, devices may be segregated according by operating system or other technical features.
Conventional fibre channel fabric topologies do not allow the logical segregation of devices which are coupled to the same fabric. Rather, devices can be prevented from communicating with each other typically only if they are actually physically separated (e.g., coupled to different fabrics). However, this method does not facilitate the dynamic re-configuration of connections between devices since each re-configuration requires a physical recoupling of devices.
Thus, there is a need to configure a fabric so as to restrict communications between sets of devices connected to the fabric. There is further a need to be able to dynamically re-configure the fabric and to support multiple configurations of device connections.